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@benglick the only thing that jumps out to me at first is the tree on the left third of the picture. it is the first thing my eyes are drawn to in the photo, however, I feel like it could be a little lighter. right now it is almost a silhouette next to the bright sun and lens flare. the only other thing I noticed, is there is a green circle on the left side of the tree, which appears to be part of the lens flare. I think it would be best to edit it out, as it is a little distracting. other than that I love the picture! it reminds me a lot of where I live, so much that I thought it was a place next to our house at first. great job on this photo. 🙂

Hey Luke! Thanks so much for taking time to look at the photo! Great Advice! I took a few minutes and worked with what I could on what you said.

1. The tree! Great pointing that out! Unfortunately, that’s gonna require more of a photoshopping skill than I have. Due to how many branches there are, I can’t hit all of them to brighten then and it stands out too much using a larger masking tool. 🙁 I did however do my best to lighten the photo as a whole and take the sky more blue to hopefully get that tree to stand out more!

2. The green circle. Ugh. The more I am experiencing lens flare, the more frustrating it becomes. To get rid of that entirely seems impossible, I can’t recolor it cause it will effect everything its covering since it’s transparent. To remove it entirely is what I attempted, you can’t remove it over the grass however, but I did attempt to remove it from the sky. However a new issue I have found is the sky over in that corner is now colored a weird green… Maybe I can do another color emphasis on it without affecting everything too much?

Well, while stuff is a working progress, I have attached a new photo with the edits on it! 🙂 Thanks again for taking time to look at stuff. (P.s, this photo was taken in a small town in Virginia that I like called Weyers Cave)

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Ben, I see what you mean about that weird green color. it almost looks like there is a slight haze over it. I’m not exactly sure what it is, or how to fix it, while still getting rid of the circle. would you mind if I downloaded and tried editing it? I am by no means an expert editor, however I would like to see how it would work with some local editing.

@benglick here is what I came up with. it’s definitely not perfect. I did get rid of the small green circle, and I also got rid of the Large circle around the tree. I hope this gives you some ideas for further edits.

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~ Luke, thanks so much for editing the photo, I can see what you did. 🙂 Unfortunately, there is still just too much lens flare to do anything with it. 🙂 Plus, this was never a good photo, just one with an obvious problem that maybe I could understand how to fix better. However, I completely appreciate and am thankful for your effort and time on helping me understand the mechanics of the photo and how to make it better 🙂

~ Mr. Staddon, thanks a tremendous amount for the link and the ideas on the photo! I took sometime to look them over, it may be that my setup or equipment isn’t enough but I found that any of those ideas just short of a photoshop (which I never want to do cause it ruins the photo.) didn’t work. 🙁 However, the ideas have begun to work on several other photos with the same problem; so I am very appreciative that you shared that, thank you! – Again like I said with Luke, this photo was pretty bad to begin with, it has a lot of technical problems. I deeply appreciate your offer to critique this on your webinar, however, I think I will pass on that this time. 🙂 Thank you for your time, help, and support.

~ Mr. Staddon – Thank you for bringing this up on your webinar last night! So sorry I missed it. I appreciate you being so kind, I honestly thought this photo was pretty bad, but I am truly grateful for you looking at it!

I have tried everything you advised, and I got rid of the line in the sky, (that was impressive I didn’t even see it to be honest, I am glad you caught it)

I tried everything to make the tree stand out more, I just can’t get it. There are so many branches and the grass is so golden that any attempt to darken/deepen the tree just fails against the background. So I am very sorry I couldn’t get that.

I did have one question real quick, so these photos were all taken in a dark setting with a bright sunset. So naturally I turned the ISO down and the shutter speed up. This method seemed to work pretty well looking at it on the camera display, however when I brought it over onto my computer the photo went like super dark, like ridiculously dark. I can’t figure out why? I didn’t mess with it, but the photo on the camera display is fine, but on the computer it became super dark. Thus, I had to increase the brightness which made everything just look “blech” and it added a lot of noise without me meaning to. Any ideas on how to fix/what this was?